by Prit Buttar
All of the Gestapo’s roads lead to Paneriai. And Paneriai is death. You doubters, shed your illusions! Your children, husbands and wives are no longer living. Paneriai is not a camp. 15,000 have been shot to death there … It is true, we are weak and helpless, but the only answer to the enemy is: Resistance! Brothers! Better to fall as free fighters than live by the grace of murderers! Resist! Resist to your last breath!42
The Germans did all they could to crush any attempt at resistance. If a member of a work detail ran away and escaped, the other workers in the detail were held as hostages, and if the escapee did not return, they were executed. Nevertheless, there was a steady trickle of young Jews from the ghetto to the nearby forests, where they joined the burgeoning groups of partisans.
On October 1941, a limited number of ‘yellow certificates’ was distributed to Jews in the Vilnius ghetto. Only those most capable of physical work received the certificates, and all those without certificates were rounded up and taken to Paneriai for execution. Esterowicz was able to obtain a precious certificate from his Polish employer, but many of his family were not so lucky. Perella Esterowicz left the ghetto with her parents during the ‘action’, and was taken in by a non-Jewish family. Her parents returned to the ghetto without her, consoling themselves that at least she was now comparatively safe. They must have had very mixed feelings when Perella decided that she wished to stay with her family, and returned to the ghetto a few days later by tagging onto a work party marching back for the night.43
Sometimes, resistance and help came from the most surprising individuals. Anton Schmid was an Austrian who had already helped a small number of Jewish neighbours escape in 1938. He was conscripted in 1939, but aged 39 was assigned to a rear area unit. In Vilnius, Feldwebel Schmid was tasked with helping troops who had become separated from their units to return to their parent formations. He was a man who kept very much to himself, as a friend later described:
He was a simple, true-hearted man, in thoughts and deeds an awkward man of few words, not religious, he wasn’t philosophical, read no newspaper, nor any books, he was not a great thinker, his outstanding characteristic was his humanity.44
Schmid discovered that his military role allowed him to issue work permits to Jews in the Vilnius ghetto, and he started to do so. The Jews regarded work permits as ‘death holiday passes’, as the bearer of such a permit was far less likely to fall victim to an ‘action’. As a result, many people were saved from execution. But Schmid did not stop there. He regularly provided food for Jews in the ghetto, and he arranged for a birth certificate to be produced for a Jewish girl, stating that she was actually an Aryan; in other cases he arranged documents that allowed a small number of Jews to travel across Lithuania. Most of these took the opportunity to disappear. On some occasions, when Jews to whom he had issued work permits were arrested, he went to the Lukiškės Prison and had them released. Perhaps his most important contribution was a fairly regular journey that he made from Vilnius to Belarus with his truck, usually carrying timber. On most journeys, he took between 20 and 30 Jews, concealed behind the timber, with him. At the time, the repression of Jews in Belarus was far less severe than in Lithuania, and consequently he saved perhaps 300 people from imminent death. Some took advantage of the less strict regime in Belarus to run off to join the partisans.
Partly as a result of these journeys, and partly due to other clandestine movements of Jews, the notion of armed Jewish resistance – something that originated in Vilnius – spread to other centres, such as Warsaw, Białystok and Grodno. Members of the underground movement frequently stayed in Schmid’s accommodation during their travels, and on occasion he made journeys specifically to help them reach their destinations.
Schmid was a solitary figure, and for obvious reasons he could not confide in his fellow Germans about his activities. It is therefore a matter of speculation as to why he acted as he did. It seems that this devout Christian acted purely on the dictates of his conscience. In late January 1942, he was arrested when a ghetto was established in Lida, in Belarus. Some of the Jews in the new ghetto were originally from Vilnius, and a few told the Gestapo how they had travelled to Lida. At his court martial, his defence lawyer stated that Schmid had tried to save Jews so that they would be available as labour for the Wehrmacht, but Schmid himself rejected this line of argument, stating clearly that he had transported Jews away from Vilnius to save their lives. He was convicted and executed by firing squad on 13 April 1942. Shortly before his death, he wrote a final letter to his wife and daughter, which he handed to the Catholic priest who attended him on his last day. The letter gives the best insight available into his motives:
Today I can tell you everything about the fate that has overtaken me … unfortunately, I have been condemned to death by a military court in Vilnius … they aren’t able to secure me a pardon, and think that it [the request for a pardon] will be rejected, as all have been rejected so far. Therefore, my dears, hold your heads high. I have resigned myself to my fate … our God on high has decided that it cannot be altered. I am at peace today … our dear Lord has willed this and made me strong. I hope that he will make you as strong as me.
I want to tell you how this all came about. There were a lot of Jews here, who had been gathered together by the Lithuanian military and were shot in a field outside the city, as many as two or three thousand people. They smashed the children against the trees along the way. Can you imagine. I had to take over the ‘stragglers’ office’, which I didn’t want to do, and 140 Jews worked there. They asked me if I could take them away from here. I let myself be persuaded. You know how I am, with my soft heart. I couldn’t think, and helped them, which was bad according to the court.
My dear Steffi and Gerta, you think this is a heavy blow for us, but please, please forgive me. I have only acted as a human being and didn’t want to hurt anyone.
When you have this letter in your hands, my dears, I will no longer be in this world. You will not be able to write to me, but be sure that we will see each other again in a better world with our dear Lord.45
When word of his conviction and execution spread through his family’s neighbourhood, many people openly referred to Schmid in conversations with his family as a ‘traitor to the nation’. On one occasion, the family home was attacked, and windows were broken.
Of about 40,000 Jews in Kaunas in June 1941, only a small number managed to escape before the arrival of the Germans. After the initial wave of killings immediately after the arrival of the Wehrmacht, most of the shootings took place at Fort VII, one of a ring of 19th-century fortifications around the city. From mid-August, the surviving Jews were confined to the ghetto in Vilijampolė, an area of poor housing where previously about 15,000 had crowded together. Joheved Inčiūrienė was 17 when the Germans arrived; she had attempted to flee with her family, but they had travelled only 30 miles before they were overtaken by the Wehrmacht and forced to turn back.
I found it unbelievable that only a day after the assault [the arrival of German troops in Kaunas] the attitude of our Lithuanian neighbours to the Jews had changed.
… Our family was almost the first to be resettled in the ghetto. The Jews themselves had to encircle the ghetto with barbed wire. This took from 15 July to 15 August … On 15 August, they set up armed watch posts at the ghetto gates, and free movement to and from the ghetto was stopped.
… On 17 August, the third day after the ghetto gate was closed, the Gestapo ordered that 500 men were to be gathered in preparation for archival work. On 18 August, these selected men were taken away from the ghetto gate in trucks; they were never seen again.46
It seems that this was the first move to eradicate the better educated members of the ghetto.
As in Vilnius, there was at first a large ghetto and a small ghetto, though on this occasion they were connected by a wooden bridge. There was the same arrangement with a Judenrat and ghetto police, overseen by Hauptsturmführer Fritz Jordan. Rations were completely inadequate
, and every attempt was made by the ghetto dwellers to grow whatever vegetables they could. There were repeated ‘actions’ to reduce the population; on 26 September 1941, perhaps 1,500 elderly, women and children – those without work – were taken to Fort IV on the outskirts of the city and shot. On 4 October, the small ghetto was cleared. Those with work permits and their families were separated into one location, while the rest were driven away for execution. There was a small hospital in the ghetto – there were no medical supplies, and it served merely as a place where the sick could be gathered together – and this was simply burned down with its inhabitants still inside.47
On 28 October, the inhabitants of the large ghetto were sorted in a similar manner. Those deemed as ‘unneeded’ were transferred to the small ghetto, and from there were taken to Fort IX and shot the day after.48 Many families that had survived together were now forcibly separated with individuals being sent to either side of the party responsible for sorting them, though in a few cases there were reprieves:
It took almost all day before our group stood before Rauca [Hauptscharführer Helmut Rauca] … Lena clung to my arm, her sister Rachel on the other side. It had been clear for a long time that the right side was bad. Most of our group were sent to the right. When we got there, Rauca merely waved his stick to the right. Our death sentence. I wanted to cry out that it was a mistake, that we were young and could work. But actually I only cried out in my thoughts. Then Rauca saw Lena. He stopped our row, called her out and ordered her to go to the left. ‘You are far too beautiful to die,’ he said. But Lena just shook her head proudly and replied that she wanted to share the fate of her family.49
Those who survived – it is estimated that there were now about 17,000 people left in the ghetto – faced constant danger. Many were required to work at the new Luftwaffe airfield on the edge of the city, and Luftwaffe personnel repeatedly came to the ghetto to round up people for work. Many were beaten if they showed reluctance, others were killed on the spot. Joheved Inčiūrienė took advantage of an opportunity to escape while returning to the ghetto from the airfield, and sought refuge with a schoolfriend who had already run considerable risks in bringing food to the ghetto. It was impossible for her to be sheltered indefinitely, so she tagged onto another work party returning to the ghetto, but continued to escape overnight from time to time, and then return with precious food. On one occasion, she was challenged by a Lithuanian guard, but to her great good fortune, discovered that she had attended school with his sister. The guard helped her, and his family sheltered her for a few nights. On another occasion, a Lithuanian woman betrayed her to a guard, and she was badly beaten. Eventually, she made a permanent escape, living in the countryside for several years before the arrival of the Red Army. Her family was less fortunate. Her mother and sister were transferred to a camp in Estonia, where they died, and her father perished in the Kaunas ghetto.50
Although the ‘actions’ ceased in the Kaunas ghetto during 1942, Jews continued to be shot at Fort IX. These were from within the Reich, and had originally been intended for internment in the ghetto established in Riga. However, as the Riga ghetto was full, they were diverted to Kaunas, and executed there. By the end of the year, about 6,000 Jews from Vienna, Frankfurt am Main, and Munich had been killed in the fort.51
The ghettos continued to function through 1942 into 1943, with a steadily falling population – despite the diminishing threat of ‘actions’, disease and malnutrition took a toll. In mid-1943, many of those in the Vilnius ghetto who were deemed to be the fittest for work were transferred to the Vaivara concentration camp in Estonia. At the end of 1943, the Vilnius ghetto was ‘liquidated’. Mascha Rolnikaite, whose eldest sister had already left the ghetto, was present when an announcement was made that the ghetto would be evacuated, with its remaining inhabitants transferred either to Vaivara or to a work camp near Šiauliai. The latter did not exist, and the people in this group were actually destined for an extermination camp. A day later, the family joined a column of Jews who were marched to a hall, where the few remaining men were separated and taken away. The women and children remained there overnight. The following morning, they were marched out, and suddenly, a soldier separated Rolnikaite from her family:
The soldiers had formed a chain across the entire width of the road. Behind this chain – and beyond another one on the other side – was a large crowd. Mama was there. I ran to the soldier and asked him to let me through. I explained that I had been separated from my mother by mistake. She was standing over there. It was my family, and I had to go to her.
I spoke to him, beseeched him, but the soldier took no notice of me whatsoever. He looked at the women who were coming through the gate. From time to time, he pulled another over to our side. The rest were pushed into the crowd where Mama stood.
Suddenly, I heard Mama’s voice. She cried that I shouldn’t come to her. And she asked the soldiers not to let me through, as I was still young and could work hard …
‘Mama!’ I cried, as loud as I could, ‘Come to me!’ She merely shook her head and called to me with an oddly hoarse voice, ‘Live my child! At least you should live! Take revenge for the little ones!’ She drew them close to her, said something, and lifted them laboriously up one at a time, so that I could see them. Ruwele looked at me strangely … he waved with his little hand …
They were pushed to one side. I never saw them again.52
Perella Esterowicz recalled that many of the guards during the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto were Estonians. She and her parents were able to survive the deportations and executions that attended the end of the ghetto through the actions of a remarkable man.
Karl Plagge was an army major in charge of a vehicle repair facility near Vilnius. Although he was a member of the National Socialist Party, believing that it was the only political party capable of restoring Germany to its rightful place, he was heavily criticised before the war for refusing to accept National Socialist racial theories. He was deeply shocked by the plight of Jews in Vilnius, and decided to take whatever steps he could to prevent killings. Like Schmid, he had given dozens of work permits to Jews since the formation of the ghetto, and he now took about 1,300 Jews from the ghetto, including the Esterowicz family, to a special labour camp that he had created next to his repair facility.
Plagge had gone to great lengths to establish the ‘slave labour’ camp, housed in buildings built before the war by a Jewish entrepreneur. He ensured that the workers received rations that, whilst still minimal, were at least sufficient to sustain them. He forbade his staff from mistreating the Jews, but was unable to prevent all attacks on the inmates of the camp. Taking advantage of Plagge’s absence, the SS visited the camp in late 1943 to demonstrate to the inmates that their continued existence was never to be taken for granted, as Perella Esterowicz recalled:
I do not remember the exact date … After all the workers had been mustered out on the yard where the Jewish police had built a gallows (on the command of the Germans) [as was the case in the ghettos, several Jews had been selected to form a police force to enforce ‘order’ in the camp], the gate suddenly opened and three Gestapo men, led by Bruno Kittel, the liquidator of the ghetto, drove in an open car. They brought with them two fugitives from our camp they had caught – a woman who belonged to a family of society’s dregs nicknamed ‘Pozhar’ [‘Fire’] and her unofficial husband. The deathly silence which had begun to reign as the Gestapo men moved towards the gallows with the condemned was broken by the piercing cry of ‘Mama!’ which suddenly sounded from a window on the upper floor of one of the buildings in which we saw a child’s head. Before the passing of even one minute a little girl, maybe eight or ten years old, ran out from the building and rushed with a joyous cry of ‘Mama!’ to embrace her mother. We witnessed here a horrible, heartrending scene – the joy of the child who thought that she had found the mother she was longing for, and the face of the mother, distorted by suffering, passionately embracing her child, knowing that she was w
alking to her death. When the whole group arrived at the place of execution, Kittel motioned to Grisha Schneider, the camp’s blacksmith … to step forward from our lines and ordered him to be the executioner. However, when the man (whom they were hanging first) fell twice when the noose tore, Kittel ordered him to kneel down and killed him by a shot in the back of his head. Afterwards, while he was killing the woman, one of the other Gestapo men killed the child. The Gestapo was not satisfied with this, however. Having decided to shoot 36 women the next morning after the men had gone to work as a punishment, to forestall any more flights from the camp, the Gestapo ordered the Jewish police to chase all the women and children out of the rooms onto the huge yard adjacent to the buildings.
When the policeman Miganz, a man my parents knew, chased us down onto the yard, we were immediately surrounded by rifle-wielding Lithuanian police. Kittel mustered us out into rows and stood before us with his arms crossed. My mother and I were in the first row, Kittel was standing just in front of us … Then Kittel smiled and, I guess on a sign from him, the Lithuanian police started to club us, herding us around the side of the building, toward where they were grabbing and dragging women into the black van standing in between the two buildings.53
Fortunately for Perella and her mother, her father managed to extract them from the women and children being herded into the van. The following March, again when Plagge was away from Vilnius, the SS returned:
In the early morning, after the men had left for their work places, the gates of the camp were opened suddenly and into the yard of our camp drove in trucks carrying a large contingent of officials of the Gestapo and of the Lithuanian police, led by Martin Weiss …
The new arrivals scattered swiftly over the dwellings from which they began dragging out children and teenagers up to the age of 15, as well as even those few elderly who had managed to get to our camp. They took the captured to the trucks into which they pushed their prey. Heartrending scenes took place in our camp when the sobbing children vainly looked to their parents for protection. Mrs Zhukowski … was killed by Martin Weiss with a shot from his revolver, after Mrs Zhukowski had called him ‘murderer’. … In some cases the mothers, not wanting to abandon their children in this terrible moment, shared their children’s fate voluntarily. The fate of the seized children was more than terrible. As we learned later after the cessation of hostilities … since the ‘gas chambers’ could not keep up with their task, the transports with the children were sent straight to the ovens. I avoided this horrible fate by hiding …
